What's the truth: The levees didn’t overflow. They broke. The disaster area could’ve been mitigated if the levees weren’t in disrepair. “Key levees, including the 17th Street and London Avenue canals in the heart of the city, failed with water well below levels they were designed to withstand,” the Washington Post wrote. Vanity Fair called what happened a man-made disaster that resulted from “more than four decades' worth of mistakes, misjudgments and misfeasance by the US Army Corps of Engineers.”

What’s the truth: The data doesn’t support this. Some violent crime, like homicides and robberies, did see an uptick after Katrina, a 2010 study showed. But most other crimes did not show a significant change. And violent crime in urban areas had already been on the rise since 2003, years before Katrina hit.

“If a bunch of violent New Orleans residents were taking over the streets of Houston, it would be unlikely they'd commit homicide but not other crimes,” the Houston Chronicle wrote last week. Also other cities with evacuees didn’t see significant bumps in violent crime.
So while you could say murder cases in Houston did jump up in the aftermath of Katrina, it feels like race-baiting to blame it on evacuees. Moreover, the trend of a crime wave appears exaggerated.

What’s the truth: The media spread unverified rumors. These heinous crimes turned out to be myths. The editor for the New Orleans Times-Picayune admitted afterward that both telephone breakdowns and the race and class of the evacuees likely played the biggest role in the rumors’ proliferation.

It didn’t help that Mayor C. Ray Nagin erroneously declared on Oprah that people were "in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."

What’s the truth: Perhaps craziest rumor to erupt in the Katrina aftermath described a Dystopian world where rooftop snipers picked off those who were left behind. Kyle made the claim to several people, according to a New Yorker article. None of these outlandish and overly complicated tales could be substantiated. Wrote Snopes: “One person disappearing under such circumstances is unusual; thirty or so is truly unbelievable.”

Local and state governments deserved as much blame as the federal level.

What’s the truth: Ex-FEMA head Michael “Heckuva Job” Brown keeps insisting that the government’s disastrous response was not his fault. Nobody came out looking great in the wake of Katrina. But the state and local governments were never designed to handle a disaster of this magnitude.

FEMA exists for that reason, but the agency had been weakened over the years and was ill-equipped for Katrina. To be fair, Brownie appears to have been scapegoated. But he should be condemning the Army Corps that neglected the city and his former boss, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff.

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco ignored the Bush Administration’s calls to declare a state of emergency.

What’s the truth: Gov. Kathleen Blanco declared a state of emergency three days before the storm hit, beating Mississippi by a day. Nagin dragged his feet on a mandatory evacuation for New Orleans. The biggest failings lie with the US Army Corps of Engineers, who allowed the levees to fall into disrepair.

What's the truth: George W. Bush and Chertoff both made this statement following Katrina. But many journalists reported on New Orleans’ almost derelict flood-protection system. And Slate notes that in 2002, the city newspaper did a series on “a worst-case scenario storm” (stronger than Katrina) and described a similar situation to what would happen three years later.

What's the truth: Another good one debunked by Slate this week. Only about half of metro area was below sea level. Wrote Slate, “But even some areas above sea level, including much of the Lower 9th Ward, flooded after Katrina because of levee failures.”

What's the truth: Residents didn’t ignore the order as much as they failed to have the means to leave the city. The evacuees who left before Katrina were mostly middle class and white and had reliable access to transportation, money and social networks outside of hurricane-ravaged area.

Texas has the only state flag that’s permitted to fly at the same height as the U.S flag.

Veracity: False

Snopes says: First of all, there are no flag “laws.” There is a flag code, but you can’t be penalized for not following them. Furthermore, any state flag can be flown at the same height as the national flag. But Texas’ state flag code even says “the United States flag should be above the state flag.”

Snopes says: Yes, this tragic technology horror story did happen. The elevator decapitated a 35-year-old surgical resident at Christus St. Joseph Hospital in 2003. The resident was pinned by the elevator’s closing doors as he tried to exit onto the second floor. “The elevator car then moved upward, partially severing the doctor's head,” the Houston Chronicle wrote.

Snopes says: This list claiming a number of coincidences between Lincoln’s assassinations in D.C. and JFK’s assassination in Texas has circulated for years. Most of the quirks barely qualify as coincidences. (“The names Lincoln and Kennedy each contain seven letters.” So what? But while Kennedy did have a secretary named Evelyn Lincoln, there’s no proof she warned him about going to Dallas. And Lincoln did not have a secretary named Kennedy (His two White House secretaries were named John however. Crazy!)

Snopes says: No law prohibits the plucking of the iconic Lone Star State flower. The Houston Chronicle wrote in 2003 that the state receives so many queries about the rumor that they put together standardized statement to answer all requests.

Snopes says: No, the classic horror flick wasn’t inspired by a bunch of cannibalistic hillbillies that lived in rural Texas. But… the chainsaw-crazed Leatherface was based on one of the most notorious serial killers in U.S. history, farmer Ed Gein, who supposedly enjoyed his fair share of cannibalism, and he definitely mutilated the bodies of his victims.

Sam Houston Institute of Technology changed its name to Rice University to avoid an unfortunate acronym

Veracity: False

Snopes says: No this dirty institute of technology never existed. In addition, Furman University (in South Carolina) was never called the Furman University of Christian Knights. And Friends University was not named at one time the Friends University of Central Kansas.

Snopes says: The surcharge did not occur at Buffalo Wild Wings’ nationwide. But one angry franchisee added a 2 percent Affordable Healthcare Act surcharge to receipts in January 2015. Following customer complaints, they dropped the ACA surcharge.

Texas lawmakers once passed a resolution to honor the Boston Strangler

Veracity: True!

Snopes says: Waco Rep. Tom Moore Jr. got the resolution passed as a joke back in 1971. He wanted to prove a point that his fellow reps did not read or understand half the legislation they pass (and that was even harder before Wikipedia), so he wrote up one asking the state to honor Albert de Salvo for “his noted techniques involving population control and applied psychology.”

The Boston Strangler as de Salvo was better known was tied to the deaths of 13 women around Boston in the early 1960s. After the vote, Moore withdrew the resolution and explained his morbid prank.

When the U.S. admitted Texas into the Union, a clause in the affirming document stated could be divided into five states.

Veracity: True!

Snopes says: The 1845 Join Resolution for Annexing Texas floated the possibility of additional states “not exceeding four in number, in addition to said State of Texas.” The Constitution (among other sources) overrides this prospect however. In Article IV, Section 3, it reads “no new states shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other states.”

A University of Texas at Austin student once woke after a wild night of partying to discover someone had stolen his kidneys.

Veracity: False

Kidney theft is a popular urban legend. But this one has such close ties to the University of Texas that the school’s student newspaper had to deny reporting the story. Wrote the Daily Texan editorial board in 1996: “We have received several queries about establishing a fund to defray medical costs for the student. No fund exists because, to the extent of our research, the story never happened. It certainly WAS NOT reported by The Daily Texan.”

Snopes says: Rumors keep turning up about radical Islam in Texas. Whether it’s infiltrating Texas through Mexico (false) or this one. Yes, there’s an Islamic Tribunal in Dallas. It’s one of many religious-based centers that do mediation and tribunal. But as the center’s own website says: “These proceedings must be conducted in accordance with the law of the land; local, state and federal within the United States.”

Snopes says: There’s a reason the above sentence is written in the past tense. McConaughey’s brother owns the ranch with his family. The actor did own a share of it, but sold it in 2011, according to his rep. His brother said McConaughey was more involved in the cattle-raising side of the ranch anyway.

But the rumor became a big deal before McConaughey gave a commencement speech at the University of Houston in May 2015.

Snopes says: Clifford Hall did spend eight days in jail last year in an unusual child support dispute. But the issue had nothing to do with Hall paying too much money. He told authorities that a clerical error in his paychecks led to him missing child support payment due dates.

Communication failures, blame shifting and prejudices all played a role in the swarm of rumors that circulated after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005.

On the 10th anniversary of the storm’s destruction, many of those bogus reports about crime and the disaster response continue to exist. Even “American Sniper” Chris Kyle created a completely unsubstantiated myth that he killed looters with government permission.

Much worse: The now-infamous case of Danziger Bridge. In response to an emergency call, New Orleans police officers reportedly fired into a group of civilians, killing two people. Five officers were convicted in the killing of the unarmed pedestrians. Last week an appeals court ruled for a retrial.